It's 11:57 PM
on a thursday.
I just rolled out of bed
and took a few hits off a roach I had
lying around.
What city lights there are outside are centered in the one block
around my window.
It was supposed to snow
but it's just gray
and damp outside.
Nothing moves but a column of steam from a mill(?)
a few blocks south/southwest.
Rising inbetween blue and yellow streetlights.
Water billowing up from who knows what body of water
and freezing again on the frigid air.
As if it were feeding the oppressive mist
over everything.
As though the sky were drinking from the Bear River
and sitting, fat and content
on top of us all.
Not snowing,
just icy and motionless
and gray.

I saw visions of tortured souls
ripped apart by machinery
in the bowels of a concrete prison
and reassembled
like patchwork quilts
and I was awestruck with horror
at what I saw
and then I woke up.

Relief gave way,
after a few minutes,
to a deeper dread
because what I had seen was not
something I had been forced to watch,
it was something that came out of me

I had given those feverish images
of inhuman evil and suffering
life.

I spend so much time
gripped by the fear of the world outside
my home, outside
my bed, outside
my body
and now I feel like
nowhere
is safe.

It is three o’clock in the morning.
The streets are quiet.
There are no car alarms.
There are no dogs barking.

And I am too afraid to sleep.

I dream of delirious shadows and frantic,
whispering light.
in the doom of an hour my bones
are opened to the sky.
rise from me, mortal pilot.

eyes unseamed to the foot of
a pillar of fire in the void,
screaming truths,
becoming.
vaporize and depart.

adrift in the hysteria of one second,
a rapidly receding horizon.
awash in a thunderous confluence,
mind rent.
I am clay,
transmuted.

The coffee in the waiting room
at the mechanic
is terrible.
They've got this old *** of folgers
with powder creamer.
But with four inches of fresh snow on the ground
on a saturday morning
waiting for nothing special
with nowhere in particular to be
it is very nice and in fact
even refreshing.

Pale figure
softness laid bare
to the maw of the earth-
those gnawing rocks
sharpened by the rain.
They do not frighten you.

Even still I picture the cold dawn
of spring painting the snowdrifts
and you
in a silent snapshot.

Would that I could join you there
to hear your breath mix with the wind
to feel the heat of the stones where you sit.
They cannot defeat you-
they envy you,
for you are so unlike them.

You are the ghost
of these limestone hills
and you haunt me.

He floats
like frizzy cottonwood seeds on a wind that is not really there,
not really.
And light and sound and rain
pass him through-
he is borne on a whim
over the still-living earth
waiting in the wetted hollow
of some behemoth fallen tree,
waiting.

Wistfully wandering
listlessly longing
dogtired daydreamer,
airy apparition,

are you just a moving lucid hallucination,
or is it me who lives in your
imagination?